The ‘professorisation’ of INEC’s job, the clemency that rankles, and the annihilation of PDP

Too many things are happening at the same time in Nigeria. While the appointment of the successor of the immediate past chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is raising dust in the polity, the Presidency came again with the controversial “go in peace” declaration to criminals and malefactors in the name of clemency. But while all these were going on, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), the leader of the opposition groups in the country that should bark at those decisions, was battling with all manner of infirmities. Again, who will bell the cat?

After Yakubu, do we still need another professor?

The question that raced through the minds of many Nigerians when the name of the new Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) was announced the other day was, “What magic have professors brought to Nigeria’s electoral process?”

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu had nominated Professor Joash Ojo Amupitan as the successor of Professor Mahmood Yakubu. The announcement followed the confirmation by the National Council of State (NCS) last Thursday. Until his appointment, he was a deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Jos.

Amupitan hails from Ayetoro Gbede in the Ijumu Local Government Area of Kogi State.

Read also: Why I decided to bow out of INEC – Yakubu

Since 1960, Nigeria has been appointing chairmen of the nation’s electoral body. The current INEC was set up in 1998. Before then, the electoral body in Nigeria was called the Federal Electoral Commission (FEDECO) and was established in 1960.

A number of eminent Nigerians had been appointed to superintend over elections. Some of them were senior advocates of Nigeria (SAN), while some were professors who had spent years in academia.

The involvement of members of the Ivory Towers in election management became prominent in Nigeria with the appointment in 2010 by President Goodluck Jonathan of Professor Attahiru Jega as the INEC chairman.

Jega was a former vice-chancellor of Bayero University.

Upon his appointment, he began to propagate the idea that involving vice chancellors and other very senior members of universities could add value to the election management.

Pronto, he began to recruit them as returning officers on an ad hoc basis.

But Professor Jega was not altogether spotless in all that he did during his tenure. His era was not without controversy.

Some observers said that if Goodluck Jonathan had not easily accepted defeat but decided to challenge the 2015 presidential election, certain dark dealings by the electoral umpire could have been discovered.

But Jonathan’s decision to throw in the towel even when the results had not been announced created an impression that the conduct of the election was without flaws.

Jega was succeeded by Professor Mahmood Yakubu in 2015 by then-President Muhammadu Buhari. He sustained the practice of using professors like himself as returning officers. The jury is still out on whether INEC under Yakubu fared very well despite deploying professors as returning officers.

Many Nigerians today accuse some of the returning officers of allowing themselves to be compromised by politicians.

Some of the professors lost their heads as soon as they saw that there was too much money to be made by participating in the electoral process.

Observers have said that Nigerians should not expect so much from Amupitan simply because he is a professor, but that he needs to prove to Nigerians why they should trust him.

The INEC has over-time lost credibility. It is so bad nowadays that whenever the name of the Commission is mentioned, people shut their ears. That was the crisis Yakubu created.

Read also: INEC’s new chairman faces voter confidence test

Moreover, the manner of Amupitan’s appointment has continued to raise questions. First, many are wondering why the president from a Yoruba-speaking part of the country should appoint a fellow Yoruba man as the INEC chairman.

Observers have also pointed to the fact that other critical institutions of government that play prominent roles in the electoral process in the country are being headed by people from the South West. For instance, the Inspector-General of Police (IGP), who deploys policemen on the election day and gives them instructions on what to do; the Department of State Security (DSS), which also deploys personnel; and the Judiciary, which handles the cases that emanate from disputed election results, are firmly under the thumbs of people from the Yoruba nation.

There are those who believe that the choice for the INEC’s new boss is a political instrument for the president to achieve whatever he wants to achieve in 2027.

It is also being said that Amupitan’s antecedents do not matter in this new job. He may have achieved a lot as an academic, but Nigerians are concerned about what he does in his new job. He must be interested in finding out why the predecessors failed as electoral umpires.

It is believed in Nigeria that the INEC’s job has become a poisoned chalice. Nobody goes there and comes out clean or with their reputation intact.

“If you have not managed a heavy budget and suddenly you are thrown into a house full of different currencies, you are bound to misbehave unless you are a person of high integrity. From not managing something big to managing billions (hefty budgets), the INEC’s new chairman might suffer a feat. We hope he survives it,” an observer who spoke on condition of anonymity said.

Talking about electoral reforms is not enough. Can Nigerians say that the reforms so far carried out have improved the quality of the nation’s elections? So, the reforms can be there and still be circumvented.

The allegation that was rampant during the Yakubu era was that elections had predetermined outcomes. The Commission shut its eyes to barefaced malfeasance and pompously told aggrieved citizens to go to court. And there were no consequences whatsoever.

So, it is hoped that such sad experiences have become a thing of the past and have gone with Yakubu!

You noticed I have not mentioned that the fate of Amupitan is tied to the Senate’s confirmation. I did not bother to waste readers’ time with that because, going by the rubber-stamping tradition of the 10th Senate, Amupitan’s confirmation is a fait accompli, as he will be told to take a bow. It was this unfortunate tradition that drove into the hall of infamy the name of Uche Nnaji, who, the other day, resigned his appointment as minister of Innovation, Science, and Technology.

Read also: Tinubu’s controversial clemency

The clemency that rankles

Kings take whatever decision they believe to be in their best interest. Such decisions may not be fully understood by the masses, or they may not even make any sense to onlookers, but so long as they serve some purpose, no qualms.

When King Herod Antipas commanded his soldiers to cut off the head of John the Baptist and present the same to a damsel whose dancing steps and wriggling waist captivated him, he just wanted to please one woman, Herodias.

Although the entire city was perplexed by the reason for the cold murder, the king was in high spirits. That is what power does to its possessors.

By the same token, when President Bola Ahmed Tinubu gave the order to pardon all manner of individuals whose bad behaviours led to their being sentenced to various degrees of jail terms or even death sentences, Nigerians froze in utter amazement.

But the president knew what drove that decision. The question is, did Herodias cook and eat John the Baptist’s head, or was it just to achieve bragging rights?

So, how may the pardon of condemned criminals, drug barons, murderers, corrupt politicians and other classes of “pardonisation” help Nigeria, or were they just for the hubris? Time will tell.

PDP: Going, going, going…?

The bones of Vincent Ogbulafor and those of Tony Anenih may be turning in their graves in discomfort over the goings-on in the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and the ridicule to which the party has been reduced.

It was Ogbulafor, who at the time was national chairman of the party, who controversially declared with an air of pomposity that the PDP would rule Nigeria for 60 years on a stretch.

Although the party had started to crumble before they (Ogbulafor and Anenih) died some years ago, they may not have imagined that there would be a total reversal of positions to the point that the PDP would now hold the short end of the stick.

In 2008, when he saw how the PDP was conquering states and making inroads into unlikely places across the country, Ogbulafor, then national chairman of the party, was beside himself with excitement. He thought that the party was invincible and on autopilot; hence, he boasted that the PDP would be in power for so many years.

Read also: Diri defects to APC, resigns from PDP

Some years after he made the boast, he gave reasons why he made the utterance. According to him, “When I was PDP chairman, there was peace, and I brought in four non-PDP states: Abia, Imo, Sokoto and Bauchi. Twenty-eight states were under me; 28 PDP governors and a good number of National Assembly members, and that was why I said PDP would be in office for 60 years.”

With the latest defection of Governor Peter Mbah of Enugu State and Governor Diri Douye of Bayelsa State to the APC, the PDP now has only eight states, about the same number that the opposition parties held in 2008 when Ogbulafor projected a 60-year reign of the umbrella association.

Moreover, if the permutations swirling around are anything to bet on, before the end of next week, Agbu Kefas, governor of Taraba State, may be on his way to joining the broom-wavers’ association, leaving the PDP with a miserable seven governors whose next move nobody is sure about.

Today, PDP has only 27 out of the 109 senators at the National Assembly. What that effectively means is that the APC has secured a two-thirds majority that enables them to approve any bill without the input of the opposition on the floor of the Senate.

What the country is witnessing is a total annihilation of a party that held the charms of yesteryears. Observers have warned that whatever may be the motivation behind the mass defection into the APC, it is not altogether healthy for the country.

In May 2013, Anenih, who was chairman of the Board of Trustees of the PDP, had expressed the fear of the likelihood of the then newly founded APC threatening the PDP’s dominance.

Anenih, who could easily be regarded as “a man who saw tomorrow” (Nostradamus), had told the then party’s apparatchiks at a meeting in Asaba, Delta State, that the opposition political parties congregating under the APC banner might be a threat to the PDP hegemony.
“We must not live under the illusion that our party is invulnerable. Although the existing opposition parties are still too small, fragile and sectional, we must not ignore the possibility that a merger of these parties may constitute a threat to our current dominance of the political terrain,” Anenih had ominously said.

He noted that the APC, an initiative of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), Congress for Progressive Change (CPP), All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) and a faction of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGN), had the avowed mission to dislodge the PDP from power come 2015.

But the likes of Bamanga Tukur, a former chairman of the PDP, had derided the merger, saying selfish ambition would create division among the merging parties.

Political observers have said that the exodus of governors and lawmakers from the PDP to the APC could be traced back to 2014, when there was a sharp disagreement between the North and South over Goodluck Jonathan.

Aisha Yesufu, a political activist, observed that the PDP had been destroying itself since 2014.

She recalled that despite a gentlemanly agreement that Jonathan would not be contesting in 2015, the party went ahead to “produce only one ticket for Goodluck Ebele Jonathan and denied everyone else the opportunity to contest for the seat.”

She strongly believed that if the party had got its act together, “PDP would have been sitting pretty in Aso Villa today, but as usual, they never take responsibility and always blame people. It is always someone’s fault, never theirs.”

Read also: Mbah’s defection leaves PDP groping for answers

Truth be told, there are many elements in the PDP that are afflicting the party. They have sworn never to allow the party to rest or move forward. How does it sound in the ear of anybody that the major troublemakers of the party are still calling the shots within the party? They get neither reprimands nor threats from the leadership. They play the harlotry with the ruling party and return to soil the bed of the PDP. They pretend to be inside the PDP, yet they pick dangerous stones for the APC’s catapult.

PDP may have simply outlived its usefulness. It has been taken over by undertakers and Pharaohs who have refused to “let Israel go”.

The party simply nailed its coffin with the costly mistake in 2023, when, against the writing on the wall, it decided to throw its presidential ticket open instead of zoning it to the south.

Governor Seyi Makinde, who, in cahoots with Nyesom Wike, former governor of Rivers State, held endless meetings with the then APC presidential candidate, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, is now being looked up to by the PDP as the messiah of the party.

As a member of the Wike-led G-5 governors, Makinde struck a deal with Tinubu, and the result was evident in the outcome of the elections in Rivers and Oyo State.

The National Chairman of the PDP, Umar Damagum, and the reinstated National Secretary, Sam Anyanwu, are known allies of Nyesom Wike. It is self-deluding for any member of the PDP to think that the party will make any impact in the 2027 general election with the house in tatters.

Apart from the organic crisis in the party, the most potent is the inorganically motivated crisis that is being engineered from the outside to keep the party restless like a bird perched on a hanging wire.

Observers also believe that the gale of defections by the PDP governors and lawmakers is aimed at weakening the party to the point that it cannot find the chance to organise itself for 2027.

One thing is very clear. Politicians are poor students of history. It is said that kingdoms rise and wane. It was PDP a few years ago; it is APC today; tomorrow will be for another party. So, why would anybody get unnecessarily agitated over what is playing out today? This too must pass. Politicians must be politicians!